Date: 11 Jan 2014 11:35 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
Terrific concept and story, really enjoyed this quite a bit. Gender bender isn't usually my fare and neither is canon Trek to be honest but this got me hooked pretty much straight away. Making Kirk and Gary a captain/first officer pairing, and then adding an unwanted, forced pregnancy into the mix was absolutely brilliant. As was Jane's voice throughout this story.
Many women have surely been in these kind of unfortunate situations but thanks to Trek, you added a unique spin to this tale which gives this story another dimension in which there is no real villain other than the situation in which Kirk finds herself.
Excellent work.
Date: 26 May 2013 07:06 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
This was an inspired way to treat the female Kirk. This was what I thought it would be, initially, but it just got better as we traveled deeper into Jane Kirk’s thought processes. She was facing her own Kobayashi Maru scenario here. This was her facing the inconceivable choice … not whether to watch a friend die or sacrifice someone for the sake of the ship. Whether to have a child that was forced on her, a child that would endanger her career, and one that would make her best friend’s lasting impression on the world a dark one.
She was certain it was the right choice and she went through with it, but she made sure she would be assured of the success of the baby’s life after her. She wanted to do the right thing and, in that Kirk persistence, did so. Very neatly she made her point and got what she wanted.
But the doubts, they crept back up when she recorded that message. It was a sad message, one that really struck a chord with me … would the kid ever seek out his mother? Would he ever care to? What kind of effect would that have on his life? How could it not affect his life?
This story had so many modern parallels, hit all the right notes, and was a great read. It really makes you think and that’s the best thing Trek does. You have captured that here along with the pain, hope, fear, and confusion of giving away a child … of having to deal with the effects of not having it. Well done.
Date: 26 May 2013 07:01 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
Even in the future, women have to make the tough sacrifices when it comes to our end of the babymaking bargain. I'm really glad to see that abortion is not the solution in this story -- that the baby gets a chance at life and infertile would-be parents get a chance at a baby. I appreciated Jane's honest and realistic approach to it all, and her message to her unborn son was simply beautiful. I loved that she tried to remember her best friend as he was, and not as what he became, but also owned her grief. And the echoes to canon Kirk were wonderful -- stack of books on two legs, her refusal to take no for an answer when it was simple red tape, and her commitment to her ship and crew.
Very nicely done.
Date: 30 Apr 2013 07:45 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
Good story. This is an AU that I would kind of like to read more about,as several of my OCs, in addition to being author avatars, or perhaps because of it, have that Never-Say-Die attitude that Kirk embodies so completely.
Date: 04 Sep 2012 03:23 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
Wow, this is so powerful. Something tells me you have some insight into the adoption process, from one side or another. As an adoptive mom myself, I have a letter to my son something like Jane's to hers, from a young woman who made a very similar choice. I am grateful to her for her courage every day. On a more abstract level, I wish we had technology like this!
Date: 30 Jun 2009 01:47 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
You know, I just went back and re-read this, and discovered at the end what is either a really funny coincidence or a really clever pun.
"Send the message to Enterprise, c/o Jane Hathaway."
Could be "care of"...but we know what else C.O. stands for... ;-)
Date: 19 Mar 2009 03:47 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
I don't know whether to be impressed with or to be repulsed by the concept of this story--and I do like that you made me think.
On one hand, as a major advocate of adoption, it warms my heart to see an alternative to abortion in the 23rd century. At least personally, I would like to hope that in your imagining, this completely supplanted the role that abortion has in 21st century society. To be able to give such children a chance to be adopted would be such a wonderful step forward for human society. :-)
On the other hand...it's rather unnerving to watch the impersonal way that the clinic handles it, and their assumptions about what the women need, not to mention the lack of involvement of men. Those are things I would've hoped to see society get over by then, but I guess because men can do the in-out-and-run with no consequences, it would be a tough fight to change the culture to where men were forced to accept responsibility. (Of course, I understand that in THIS case, Gary was not alive or in a state to accept responsibility. I'm talking about the way you describe the general reaction.)
Jane Kirk as a character was very interesting. In some ways, I think this could be a bit more palatable than the womanizing James Kirk that makes it so hard for me to watch TOS.
One thing, though. We've seen pregnant women on starships and stations in the 24th century, including one (Kira Nerys) that continued away missions even when she was very close to term in what would probably be considered a high-risk pregnancy. I think that to avoid the story being read as sexist, it might have been a better idea to explain the rationale behind any regulation there might be about pregnant women. Or if this is Jane's own belief, it might've been better to approach it by saying that SHE as an expectant mother did not want to bring her child into the world on a starship or take that kind of risk, not that it's some kind of general rule of "pregnant women and starships don't mix."
Overall, though, I liked the story and very much enjoyed reading it. :-)
Author's Response: Thanks for your thoughts. The sexism, unfortunately, is actually there in TOS. There are no female starship captains during Kirk's time; admittedly, Janice Lester, who tells us so, is crazy, but Kirk never contradicts her, and Kirk's crew reacts to a female Klingon *science* officer as if having a woman of such high rank amazes them. There was some backsliding. In real life, of course, it's because the 1960's were far more sexist than today. In terms of the Trek universe, I assume something happened that temporarily made women lose gains they had made, some sort of backlash. By TNG's time, Starfleet is *much* more open to women in general, to families and to pregnancy, and Kira in particular is a Bajoran officer and it always seemed to me that the Bajorans are damn near matriarchal. But the sexism -- the glass ceiling Jane Kirk has just overcome, the fact that she was slower to make captain than the male version was, the attitude toward pregnancy and the fact that "baby donation" is treated almost as if it were shameful -- I'm going off stuff that actually appeared in TOS for this. Part of the reason I'm doing my genderswap *in* TOS rather than TNG is that the life of Jeanne Picard would not be in any significant way different from the life of Jean-Luc Picard, in terms of her career at least, but TOS shows us a much more sexist Starfleet. And yeah, I'd like to believe we'd overcome all that by then, but one of the things I like to do with Trek is explore the dark side of its utopianism, the way they don't meet their lofty goals or have inadvertently introduced new negative elements (such as the lack of privacy). Things are certainly better for women in TOS's time than they are today -- I believe there was no barrier to women's success in the civilian sector, and it's mainly Starfleet's hostility to families that created the backlash for women there -- but they are not perfect and they're not even as good as they'll get by TNG's time.
Date: 01 Mar 2009 00:51 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
Hey! I put five stars! Not two and a half! Alara, dear, consider yourself with five shiny yellow stars, please.
(I believe I´ve just killed the language)
[Report This]Date: 01 Mar 2009 00:45 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
This story is so sad and so true. Why people always believe to forget is the best way to get over something? A mother accepts loosing a child,but she never forget. Nobody can "forget" something like that. When I had a miscarriage, my doctor said "think of it as you never were pregnant". What?! He wanted me to ignore the blood test? Life gets better just puting aside the bad things that happens? Jane Kirk speaking about how she wanted to "know" shows how women feels, and how their choices are not just a way to "put bad things aside" and forget, as how many people would like to believe.Sometimes choices are hard, sometimes choices are easy, but all kind of choices have outcomes women must face.
I´m sorry for my english, not a native speaker, you know.So, the deep of my comments is seriously affected by my lack of fluency. And grammar. and vocabulary.LOL
Date: 25 Feb 2009 12:24 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
There's no easy way for a woman to part with her child, whatever the circumstances. This story is so deep on so many levels. And gender transposition was the last thing on my mind when I read it, not even the role of genders itself, but the choices people make, we make. Jane is very determined, a true captain indeed, and she was here at her best, especially when explaining why she could never, ever forget this baby. Thank you very much for sharing this!
Date: 24 Feb 2009 21:36 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
That has to be the hardest thing a woman can do. You told the tale without getting bogged down in soap-opera-style wallowing in emotion yet conveyed the sense of loss well. Good job!
[Report This]Date: 23 Feb 2009 19:22 Title: Jane Kirk's Enterprise 1
I read this story quite awhile ago, and it never quite left my mind. Many stories are forgettable; you read them and go on and don't think twice, but this isn't one of 'em. I don't know if you're a Mom or not, but speaking as one, you handle the internal feelings of a mother very well -- even if she doesn't get to stay, part of Jane there will always be a mother, and I love that you acknowledged that. As you already know, I much preferred how you handled gender issues in this story versus... certain others out there. Overall a memorable, touching piece. I only wish there was more!
Author's Response: Thank you. Yes, I have four kids (the two oldest are technically stepkids, but I've raised them from toddlers, so they're my kids.) One of the things I wanted to do with the genderswap was explore how the different reproductive choices/issues women have would impact Kirk (and later Spock) differently; James Kirk has a son he never knew he had, Jane Kirk has a son she had to voluntarily give up. Both are impacted by sex and reproduction in different ways. Also, as the daughter of an adopted woman, I had some things I wanted to say about how adopted children and their biological parents used to be treated, where biological mothers were encouraged to "forget" they had children, as if they ever could. The TOS era is a curious funhouse mirror reflecting both our future and our past, so I thought it was a better venue for that than the more utopian, more egalitarian, "we've solved all that" arena of the TNG era.